On Thursday, September 6, at 8pm (Central), former Disney animator Tom Bancroft will host a live online drawing workshop. He does these workshops every two weeks; the theme of this week’s workshop is “Art and Commerce: How much is my art worth?” Registration is $10 via Paypal on CharacterMentorStudio.com.

I asked Tom if he could offer more details about the workshop structure for the benefit of Cartoon Brew readers. Here’s what he says:

These workshops are an off-shoot of the concept of mentorship I use as the framework of my newest book, Character Mentor (Focal Press). I believe strongly that we, as character artists, learn the most from seeing someone with experience take on the same drawing challenges we are faced with. That’s artistic mentorship in a nutshell. But with my schedule, I can’t do that one-on-one as much as I’d like so I started the online LIVE workshops. I want to build a community with the artists that are a part of this. They will learn from my experience but also from each other.

The workshops consist of a short lesson/ lecture (it varies every week, but always revolves around artistic “issues”), a live drawing demo, a give-away trivia question (for fun, the prize is the live drawing I do at the beginning), and in the third section I review the assignments that were submitted to me that week. We also do a Q-&-A at the end as time permits.

The redline sketches I do over 3 or 4 of the assignments speak to not just the people that did them, but to the group since they had to tackle the same assignment. I give out the assignment a few days before the workshop and artists email them to me up to the day of the workshop. We also do a Q-&-A at the end as time permits.

Amid Amidi

Amid Amidi is Cartoon Brew's Publisher and Editor-at-large.